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On today's All Things Considered, NPR film critic Bob Mondello and I have a chat with Audie Cornish about the inevitable, inscrutable Oscars.

There are eight films up for Best Picture this year: American Sniper, Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, The Theory Of Everything, Birdman, Boyhood, and Selma. Of these, exactly one is a giant popular hit. And it's not the one that oddsmakers will tell you is going to emerge with the victory. In fact, there's a distinct absence of races this year that are perceived to be especially close. So with mostly small-box-office films and mostly contests that seem to have clear winners, what's to watch on Sunday?

Well, host Neil Patrick Harris, our Official Host Of Lots Of Things, for one. He's done the Emmys and the Tonys and probably spends his Sunday nights hosting impromptu awards ceremonies for his family, but this year, he's getting the big stage for the first time.

Meanwhile, we'll be on Twitter, like much of the rest of the world, using the hashtag #NPROscars.

Late last year, a Spanish judge prohibited Uber from operating in Spain, after protests by taxi drivers. Days later, the company announced it was closing down operations here.

But less than two months later, it's reinvented itself as UberEATS, converting its network of drivers into food deliverymen.

Customers in Spain can log onto the same Uber smartphone app which they used to request rides (though they may need to update the app; Spanish telecom operators were ordered to block the original app after a judge's ruling in December). A new option labeled UberEATS allows users to order food from participating restaurants. The service is part of a partnership with the Spanish foodie website Plateselector.

Uber debuted this new service in Barcelona last night, promising food delivery in 10 minutes or less. The company already provides a similar service in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, called UberFRESH.

"The global fame of Spanish gastronomy, the cosmopolitan character of Barcelona and Spaniards' great acceptance of new opportunities in the 'on-demand' economy, are the main reasons the company chose Barcelona as the first city outside the U.S. to launch UberEATS," the company said in a statement emailed to journalists.

Most dishes cost around $11, with about a $3 delivery fee. Just like with the ride-share service, customers with GPS-enabled smartphones can watch a little taxi icon getting closer, delivering their meal.

In addition to Spain, Uber faces ride-share bans in South Korea, Thailand, India and France. It also faces stiff resistance from taxi drivers and unions in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. In India, Uber was criticized as unsafe after allegations that a woman was raped by her Uber driver. And in Sydney, Australia, the company came under fire for jacking up prices during a hostage crisis.

Nevertheless, the five-year-old San Francisco-based company has expanded to more than 50 countries. Uber is privately-held, but has been valued by investors at more than $40 billion.

That's a lot of takeout food.

Harris Wittels died Thursday. He was a stand-up comic, a television writer/producer, a musician, a frequent and dependably hilarious guest on comedy podcasts, and an author who unleashed the concept of the #humblebrag upon the cultural landscape.

He was 30 years old.

When anyone dies, our sadness is tinged with something darker and more selfish; we resent the time we'll never get to spend with that person, the days and months and years that will pile up without their presence.

When a comedian dies, particularly one so young, we feel that resentment more keenly, because laughter is a limited resource - one of a very few things with the power to make those days and months and years pass more easily.

You'll see some writing today about Wittels' coinage of the term humblebrag – the tendency for people, celebrities especially, to express a distinctly performative brand of faux-humility on social media. It became a whole thing, the #humblebrag hashtag, one Wittels frequently expressed some misgivings about.

On Twitter, you can read some of his fellow comics weighing in on his stand-up and his music (with the band Don't Stop or We'll Die, formed with Paul Rust and Michael Cassady) while his fellow Parks and Recreation writers laud his singular contributions to that show. (By the way: You know Harris, Pawnee's Animal Control guy? That was him.)

But you and me, let's talk podcasts.

Wittels may not have been a household name – in your household, anyway. In my household, and in the households of the nation's comedy nerds, his name meant something. When you saw it listed as a guest on a given comedy podcast, as he was frequently on Scott Aukerman's Comedy Bang Bang (nee Comedy Death Ray), you dropped everything and started listening while the file was still downloading.

On Comedy Bang Bang, Wittels was quick, self-deprecating, and hugely funny: he'd try out jokes he'd earlier typed into his phone in an impromptu segment called "Harris' Phone Corner" (which almost immediately became "Harris' Foam Corner" – never mind, long story) and revel in the affectionate mockery they'd inevitably receive from Aukerman and guests.

With Aukerman, he co-hosted the podcast Analyze Phish, a show whose premise (Wittels a Phish super-fan, Aukerman a bemused Phish-skeptic; they talk) does little to hint at its dogged, exultant silliness, or the exasperated affection the two men share.

I've used the word "affection" twice in the last two paragraphs, because that's the word that came through most clearly in every Wittels appearance: the guy was loved. You can hear it.

Here's a thing about podcasts – their loose, rangy, long-form format breeds a distinctive strain of intimacy. You're listening to a conversation between two or more people, with all the digressions and hoary jokes their shared history engenders, and if feels familiar, comfortable, warm.

Last November, Wittels made a second appearance on You Made It Weird, a podcast whose host, Pete Holmes, greets guests with a weaponized form of gregariousness that, if unchecked, can dominate conversations.

Listen to Wittels' appearance. You get past the ghoulishness of it quickly: yes, Wittels talks at length about cycling through addiction and recovery, and tells some harrowingly funny and off-handedly profane stories about his first, fumbling encounters with heroin. But listen to how Wittels tells them – how clear-eyed, unsentimental, brutally honest, and hilarious he is.

He's all of those things at once, each one bound up inextricably with the other. Listen to how Holmes – even Holmes! – gets quieter and quieter as Wittels talks.

It's a conversation that clocks in at an hour and forty minutes. It would never fit into the programmatic confines of radio or television; it flows, it doubles back, it halts, it lurches forward. It's a weird gift, is what it is.

Wittels is gone, and that's sad. Infuriatingly so. There's that familiar resentment – he was only 30 years old, which means we won't get decades and decades of his comedy.

But he was improbably and gratifyingly prolific. His Twitter feed (@twittels) is still there, still hilarious, still so recognizably him.

There's the Comedy Bang Bang and Analyze Phish archives, filled with Wittels' voice and humor and jokes so determinedly bad they shade into performance art.

So while mourning his absence, maybe spend some time today, and in the days and months and years to come, enjoying his digital presence.

Do a search. Listen. Laugh.

Humana, Inc. faces new scrutiny from the Justice Department over allegations it has overcharged the government by claiming some elderly patients enrolled in its popular Medicare plans are sicker than they actually are.

The Louisville, Ky.-based insurer disclosed the Justice Department's recent civil "information request" in an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 18. The company noted that it is cooperating with authorities.

"We continue to cooperate with and voluntarily respond to the information requests from the Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney's Office," Humana wrote.

The privately run Medicare Advantage plans offer seniors an alternative to standard Medicare, which pays doctors for each service they render. By contrast, under Medicare Advantage, the health plans are paid a set fee monthly for each patient based on a complex formula known as a risk score. Essentially, the government pays higher rates for sicker patients and less for those in good health.

Shots - Health News

Fraud Case Casts Spotlight On Medicare Advantage Plans

But overcharges related to inflated risk scores, intentional or not, have cost taxpayers billions of dollars in recent years, as the Center for Public Integrity reported in a series published last year.

The Center first disclosed multiple investigations of the Humana Medicare Advantage plan last May based on records filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami in a civil suit.

More Scrutiny Coming For Medicare Advantage, Obamacare Nov. 4, 2014

But Humana's financial disclosure offers fresh details into the wide scope of the Justice review, indicating it is taking aim at a range of common Medicare Advantage billing practices and fraud controls, as well as Humana's use of home health assessments of patients in its plans. The industry argues these "house calls" improve the health of elderly patients, but federal officials have been concerned that the primary objective is to raise risk scores and revenues.

Humana said the Justice Department had requested a range of records about "our business and compliance practices related to risk adjustment data generated by our providers and by us, including medical record reviews conducted as part of our data and payment accuracy compliance efforts, the use of health and well-being assessments, and our fraud detection efforts."

The government probe comes at an inopportune time for the burgeoning Medicare Advantage industry, which is mounting an intense lobbying and advocacy effort to stave off proposed government funding cuts.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is set to release proposed funding levels for 2016 on Friday. More than 16 million seniors have joined these private health plans. Humana has enrolled about 3.2 million people in Medicare Advantage plans.

What will happen to the rates is not yet clear. But the Obama administration's 2016 budget seeks to cut some $36 billion from Medicare Advantage plans over the next decade related to oversized risk scores.

Allegations that some Medicare Advantage plans manipulate risk scores, a process known in the industry as "upcoding," have been surfacing over the past year in the federal courts.

The Center for Public Integrity has previously reported on several of these whistleblower lawsuits, including one filed by a Miami doctor against Humana.

In that case, Olivia Graves alleges that a Humana medical center had diagnosed abnormally high numbers of patients with diseases such as diabetes with complications that boosted Medicare payments — diagnoses that "were not supported by medical records." Graves alleges that Humana knew about the overcharges but took no action to stop them. Humana has denied the allegations.

And in early February, a federal grand jury in West Palm Beach, Fl. indicted Dr. Isaac Kojo Anakwah Thompson on eight counts of health care fraud. He's accused of cheating Medicare out of about $2.1 million by inflating risk scores of some Humana-enrolled patients. Thompson, 55, is free on a $1 million bond and has declined comment through his lawyer.

The Florida indictment did not accuse Humana of wrongdoing, but company spokesman Tom Noland said that it had repaid the government. He declined to say how much.

New scrutiny of home visits also could prove troublesome for the industry. At least one whistleblower, a former manager at a California firm that does medical home visits, has alleged that the process was abused to inflate risk scores.

Humana has been a major promoter of these home assessments. In an email to the Center today, Noland wrote: "We believe in continuing to do in-home assessments as we see this as an important step in establishing care management plans for our members living with multiple chronic conditions."

Noland declined to say how many of the home assessments Humana has performed. But the company has previously said that it conducted the assessments for about 531,000 members in the first three months of 2014.

This piece comes from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization. To follow CPI's investigations into Medicare and Medicare Advantage waste, fraud and abuse, go here.

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